This elegant diversion was introduced,
encouraged, and promoted by a crew of rapacious sharpers, who had
made themselves necessary companions to this hopeful generation, by
the talents of pimping and buffoonery. Though they were universally
known, even by those they preyed upon to have no other means of
earning their livelihood, than the most infamous and fraudulent
practices, they were caressed and courted by these infatuated dupes,
when a man of honour, who would not join in their excesses, would
have been treated with the utmost indignity and contempt.
Though Peregrine, in his heart, detested those abandoned courses,
and was a professed enemy to the whole society of gamesters, whom
he considered, and always treated, as the foes of humankind, he was
insensibly accustomed to licentious riot, and even led imperceptibly
into play by those cormorants, who are no less dangerous in the
art of cheating, than by their consummate skill in working up the
passions of unwary youth. They are, for the most part, naturally
cool, phlegmatic, and crafty, and, by a long habit of dissimulation,
have gained an absolute dominion over the hasty passions of the heart;
so that they engage with manifest advantage over the impatience and
impetuosity of a warm undesigning temper, like that of our young
gentleman, who, when he was heated with wine, misled by example,
invited on one hand, and defied on the other, forgot all his maxims
of caution and sobriety, and, plunging into the reigning folly of
the place, had frequent occasions to moralize in the morning upon
the loss of the preceding night.
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